At the end of January, I started learning a new language called Wolof. The Wolof people are the largest ethnic group in Senegal, and their language serves as the lingua franca here. While French is the national language, Wolof is what you will hear people using on the street as they are usually more comfortable in it. French is usually a second or even third language for people here. Using the English center students as a sample, about 60% of our Senegalese students identified Wolof as their first language, whereas just 10% grew up with French as their first language.
I am using a method of language learning called GPA, or the Growing Participator Approach. This approach is modeled, in a way, after how we originally learn language as a child. Before we participate in the language by speaking, we spend a long time listening to it. Once we start speaking, our parents don’t instantly come at us with grammar rules, but over time we start to figure out the grammar, not because we have memorized the rules but because we know what sounds right and what doesn’t.
The GPA method recommends 1,500 hours of learning, split up into six phases . I completed Phase 1 this week, which includes just the first 100 hours of classroom learning. Doing 20 hours a week, this took about five weeks. For the first two weeks, we (there were six of us in the class) were not allowed to speak. If this sounds incredibly bizarre to you, don’t worry because it did to me too. But the objective was to train our ears in the new language before we started thinking about speaking and pronouncing well. This is especially important when learning a language that uses a lot of different sounds, which Wolof does.
Knowing this, I thought that the first two weeks would feel fairly relaxed since I wouldn’t be speaking. Feel free to laugh at me at this point. While we weren’t allowed to speak, from day one we were learning, on average, 10 words an hour. The target is to learn 1,000 words during Phase 1. And though we weren’t allowed to respond with words, we were still required to respond. Often this meant simply pointing to what our teacher was saying, but often it meant following commands. By the end of the very first day we were hearing commands like, “Take the match and put it under the book.” and had to follow the command. And whereas if you flunk a written test in class, no one knows besides you and your teacher, with this method all instructions are given orally and it is very clear to everyone else if you don’t know what you’re supposed to do!
During each class, we took audio recordings of the sets of vocabulary that we learned as well as segments of the different games we played. We also took pictures (or sometimes videos) to go with each set of vocabulary in order to compile an “audio dictionary” of sorts. After class, we were supposed to listen through all of our audio recordings twice before the start of the next class. I am now five weeks in, and I have yet to see a single word written in Wolof in my class. That still feels pretty wild to me!
While there is a long way to go, I am pleasantly surprised by the progress I’ve made so far. As a visual learner, I really thought this method would be very difficult for me. Admittedly there are still plenty of times I wish I could see a word written out, but I am also seeing progress in my ability to more accurately hear the different sounds in Wolof. I start Phase 2 tomorrow, which is the next 150 hours, and should take 8 or 9 weeks to complete.
For those interested, I’ve included a video below of my audio dictionary for the parts of the day and names of meals.
-Adam
